Terra’s Kitchen Subscription Box Review + Coupon – July 2017

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Terra’s Kitchen is a meal kit delivery subscription service with recipes created around the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle. According to Terra’s Kitchen, the heart-healthy, inflammation-reducing Mediterranean diet includes “colorful fruits and vegetables, nuts, heart-healthy fats (like olive oil and avocados) and minimizes red meat, sugar, and saturated fat.”

Unlike other meal kits, which offer smaller weekly menus, Terra’s Kitchen offers a menu of 50+ dishes (that changes a little less frequently) with choices for vegetarian, paleo, gluten-free, and even low-calorie diets (they even have an entire nutritionist-directed “Real Diet” program for those of you looking for healthy weight loss guidance). Set your preferences, and Terra’s Kitchen will match you with weekly meals to fit. Or, you can dive into the menu and pick what recipes work for you!

When you sign up, you’ll also choose how many meals you’d like to receive per week. Options are:

3 Dinners for 2 People (Meals start at $9.99 per serving with a minimum weekly order of $62.99)

4 Dinners for 2 People (Meals start at $9.99 per serving with a minimum weekly order of $62.99)

2 Dinners for 4 People (Meals start at $9.99 per serving with a minimum weekly order of $62.99)

Swing open the doors of the cooler, and you’ll find all of your pre-portioned ingredients neatly packaged and arranged on its teal shelves. Ingredients are antibiotic and hormone-free and mostly GMO-free and organic.

Once you’ve transferred all of the chilled, fresh ingredients to your fridge, you’ll follow the instructions on the box and leave it out front of your house to be picked up (and used again)! It’s definitely an out-of-the-ordinary approach, but I have to say, I love it! Recycling meal subscription box after box (and its insulation, and ice packs, and other materials) still feels like I’m creating a lot of waste, so I love knowing that this one cooler will be able to be used over and over again.

The ingredients for your recipes are packaged in small, super-light plastic containers—I took the containers out of my vessel and managed to fit all of them in the crisper drawer of my fridge. Terra’s Kitchen does most of the chopping, slicing, and dicing for you, which not only helps the recipes go faster but makes for smaller packages of ingredients that are easier to store.

My Subscription Addiction paid for this box. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)

First off, it’s awesome that Terra’s Kitchen allows for such a customizable meal selection process. You can easily opt for whichever dishes strike a chord with you weekly by editing your shipment on their website. My husband is a strict vegetarian, while I eat fish from time to time, so I went with 3 veggie dishes and 1 pescatarian option. You may also add à la carte items like smoothies and fruit.

I had only ever cooked cod once before (for a meal in my last Terra’s Kitchen box!). Even though that dish turned out fantastic, I wasn’t entirely confident diving into this one. It definitely appeared to be the most complicated of the 4 I received.

I appreciate that the preparation directions on the back of the meal card are short but fairly clear. The instructional photos are great! I did feel that the written directions were a bit lacking, though. Now that I’m more familiar with how Terra’s Kitchen works (2nd box here), I continue to find myself asking questions and having to skip ahead during meal prep to find answers.

For this recipe, I ended up being a bit thrown off by the use of a grill. A grill pan is clearly listed in the ingredients needed (and “grilled” is even in the meal title! ha!), so it’s completely my bad for missing this. I sort of panicked at this realization though. The only grill pan I have has never served me well. I began to whisk together my marinade ingredients while coming to the conclusion that I’d go with oven baking instead of grilling.

There’s tons of couscous in this meal! I was surprised by the amount for a 2 serving size portion. Once it was ready, I began to put together my packets.

In lieu of grilling, I put these in a 400-degree oven for about 15 minutes to start. I’m trying to be careful about ensuring that all of the fish that I consume is well done, so I ended up checking the packets and popping them back in for a couple more minutes. They actually shared a cooking tray with my veggie skewers:

These didn’t need as much time as the fish packets, so I added them to the tray halfway through.

How gorgeous is this plate? I was so impressed with all the colors. This would be a fantastic meal to prepare for guests since it’s so so wow-worthy. And the portion is quite generous as well.

I do wish that I could have followed the directions exactly and used a grill, but I had to work with what was accessible to me. And no complaints! This dish wound up being very tasty, light, and healthy. Highlights for me included the olives and the red onion on each skewer — slightly sweet with the perfect bite!

This recipe was super straightforward. The hardest part appeared to be cooking the quinoa after glancing over the instructions.

Most of the veggies come ready to go, but you do have to cut the green beans in half and give the parsley a chop.

I cooked my quinoa in a large pan and let it simmer for 15 minutes, covered, over low heat after bringing water to a boil.

The dressing was simple to compose. It’s nice that all spices, wet ingredients, and any extra oils (you must provide your own basic cooking oils — olive oil included) come in a little packet. Everything in one place!

Once the quinoa was fluffed with a fork, I combined all components. So easy and delicious! I love recipes like this.

I did take this dish to be more of a lunch meal than dinner. It would also make a nice side. The flavors were balanced, and I detected just the right amount of dressing. Being a cheese lover, though, I’d probably add 2-3x the feta next time. 🙂

I was very excited to get going on this one! Rice bowls are one of my go-to meals due to their versatility.

With the first few steps, I was a little thrown off. You’re instructed to grate your lime. Lime? I didn’t see a lime in the listed ingredients. I went back to my fridge to make sure that a lime was sent with this box. Sure enough, it was. I guess they just missed this detail on the recipe card.

Next up, I prepped my chickpeas for baking. This presented another issue. The instructions for the sauce that coats the chickpeas called for oil olive, salt, paprika (check!), brown sugar (check!), and… chili powder? Another ingredient that I was missing in my delivery. Luckily, I had some on hand.

Once I put my tray in the oven, I started on my avocado sauce. I was pretty thrilled to give my blender some love, to be honest. It doesn’t get used enough.

This meal was probably my favorite in this week’s box. The chickpeas were slightly crunchy and flavorful, the avocado dressing was cool and creamy, and the onions and sugar snap peas added just the right amount of fresh sweetness.

At first peek, this appeared to be another pretty straightforward dish. Awesome!

First thing that stuck out to me in reading over the directions was the wok. I don’t own one. A good ol’ pan would have to do!

I chopped my bok choy into smaller pieces and did the same with the onion. Your carrot comes pre-shredded, conveniently.

This photo is a little heavy on the steam (for full effect!), but you get the idea. Once the rice was fully cooked, I added sriracha and fluffed it with a fork.

It seemed that the key to a nice fried rice texture was to stir the ingredients continuously in the hot oil.

This dish turned out really well. I don’t normally go for fried rice when I get takeout or am out to eat at an Asian restaurant, but I’ll have to rethink that. I did add some extra hot sauce before eating because it lacked a little something for me, though. That, and hot sauce is a consistent in my world.

Verdict: I’m really enjoying my experience with Terra’s Kitchen so far! All of my recipes were pretty health-centric this time around, and I LOVE that. The pre-prepped ingredients made everything incredibly easy, though I didn’t love how much extra plastic packaging goes into each item. I mean, receiving an avocado or a lemon in a plastic container, sans-lid, is sort of ridiculous to me. Same goes for the satchels of spices and sauce/dressing ingredients that come with each meal — those are fine in a bag… no need to house that bag in another vessel to use up even more plastic. Alas, it is convenient to have every ingredient in its own package.

I also found the pricing to be a little misleading. I’ve found that other meal subscription boxes tend to have a set per shipment cost. It’s so great that Terra’s Kitchen allows you to fully customize your order, but the $62.99/box is a minimum. With a 4 meal plan, the actual box cost came to $100.93. If you were to opt for steak or more than 1 fish dish within each shipment under the same plan, that cost would be even more. It really adds up. However, considering the freshness of the ingredients and the beautiful recipes you have to choose from, I do think that Terra’s Kitchen is priced fairly. I’m just going to keep an extra watchful eye on pricing next time around.

Jess’s love for subscription boxes began with a makeup and skincare fixation. She’s looking forward to broadening her horizons in discovering new products within the lifestyle and food world of subscription boxes.

All views in this review are the opinion of the author. My Subscription Addiction will never accept payment in exchange for a review, but will accept a box at no cost to provide honest opinions on the box. This post may contain affiliate/referral links. If you buy something, MSA may earn an affiliate commission. Read the complete My Subscription Addiction disclosure.

4 Comments

KaeJuly 21, 2017 at 2:25 am

I’ve been thinking about trying out this box sometime in the future – I’ve tried and liked Blue apron, and am set to try HelloFresh and Purple Carrot. The one thing I find really hard to get over is the cost. Even with the $75 dollar coupon – over three boxes….I just find it so hard to think about the fact that some of these plates comparatively are like $17+, and it also doesn’t help that you can’t pick a single plate of something and from my understanding, mut get enough for two….

What do you think? It is really worth the additional price from the typical $9.99 from places like Blue apron, Hello Fresh, etc?

This is GREAT and I give it 10 points for being prepped! The number 1 reason I have not signed up for meal boxes is because I don’t want to deal with chopping and prepping. If I wanted to do that, I just might as well go to the store! Yay this box!!!